Hugo Hamilton - The Sailor in the Wardrobe

On Saturdays, every boat from every harbour seems to be out. The whole bay is full of yachts with white sails and coloured, bulging spinnakers, like one big washing line criss-crossing the bay. We’re busy all afternoon, bringing people out to the moorings, rushing for those who give the best tips. Packer knows everybody by name, but he remembers them mostly by some personal feature, like the man who speaks with a deep voice that sounds like applause coming out of his mouth. There’s the man Packer calls The Abbreviator because he keeps dropping vital words and just says luck’ over his shoulder. There’s another man called Banjo because he keeps humming the same tune, always ‘I come from Alabama with a banjo on my knee…’ He goes through every variation of the Alabama banjo tune, humming, whistling, huffing and blowing, even deliberately suppressing the melody and just hissing the beat because he can’t stop it coming through some way or another. Packer says he must keep it up even when he’s eating his dinner at home, and he probably gets into bed at night with his wife, still yawning the same bloody tune like some terrible kind of musical motor neurone disease.

There’s a well-known newspaper journalist with bushy eyebrows who goes out in a small boat that’s always leaning to one side. There’s a TV presenter who speaks in Irish and English all the time, switching back and forth in mid-sentence like a balancing act between both languages. There’s a man and his wife who go out together in the matching white Aran sweaters and life jackets, so Packer calls them The Coordinates. There’s a doctor with a pipe who leaves a sweet tobacco smell floating after him around the harbour and brings out a big bunch of children from the inner city. There’s one man who is remembered only because he once tied up his launch along the outer pier and came back from a drink in the Shangri La Hotel to find the tide gone out and his boat hanging high and dry on the ropes. There are lots of people who have no boats of their own so they take out our boats regularly, like the man who looks like Henry Kissinger with a fake suntan. The harbour lads say ‘How’s Vietnam going?’ as soon as he’s out of earshot. There’s a woman who goes out to the island to practise singing and the harbour lads start doing scales. There’s a plainclothes policeman who works in the drugs unit who never actually goes out on the water at all and is more interested in coaching football teams, but he comes down to talk to Dan for a while, using all the cool Garda lingo like ‘over and out’ and ‘mission impossible’.

And then there’s Tyrone with sandy hair and his cigarette in his mouth, carrying an engine in one hand and a bag in the other. The whole harbour seems to fall silent when he is around and you know there’s trouble in the air. This is the man who shouts at Dan, the man who threw the bottle on the island. Only this time he walks by without a word and it’s Dan Turley who is muttering abuse after him.

‘There he goes,’ Dan says under his breath. ‘Tyrone the brave. Take a good look at him, lads.’

Packer says you can smell the resentment on the pier, like old fish bait in the sun, covered in bluebottles. He says Dan is a Catholic from Derry and Tyrone is a Protestant from Belfast, so it’s like having our own mini-troubles right in front of our eyes. Tyrone turns around to give Dan a filthy look. He mutters something back, something maybe with the word ‘drowning’ in it, or maybe it’s just the way we hear it and think everything turns into a curse. He walks away and Dan steps out onto the pier to do a bit of silent Irish dancing after him. And then we’re all laughing because the harbour boys are repeating Dan’s words again until they have to hold their stomachs. We’re on the winning side now and it’s Tyrone making his way down the steps into his boat with the harbour laughter behind him.

Everybody is out on the water, fishing, sailing, or just drifting, and it’s Packer and me patrolling the bay to make sure none of our boats are in trouble. We forget about the time they tried to cut through our friendship, when Packer would not talk to me. That’s all over now and he says we’re going to do something big to make up for it.

It all started when I got friendly with Packer at school. One day on the way home, we walked into an amusement arcade on O’Connell Street to try our luck at the slot machines. We couldn’t lose. We were the biggest winners since the beginning of time, putting more and more of Packer’s money into the machines. We laughed every time we were lucky and laughed even more when we lost. We could already feel the envy of others who didn’t come with us that day, because the pennies just kept spitting out for us without stopping. No matter what machine we tried, the symbols lined up for us. It was three lemons or three bars and we kept winning more and more until at one point, we won the big jackpot. It was star-star-star, lined up in a row. Bells were ringing and pennies started cascading out into the tray for us. The women at the other one-armed bandits looked around, wondering why they were sitting at the wrong machine. It seemed like Packer had all the luck in the world.

Then the manager came running out and one of the women told him that it was her machine, that she had been at it all day long and smoked an entire packet of cigarettes while putting pennies into it. Her name was written on that jackpot.

‘Am I right, Mary?’ she said, turning to her friend. She said it was her money in that machine and now we came along, cool as you like, and just stole it from her. Robbers, she called us. So the manager threw us out for being underage. Packer argued with him but there was nothing we could do. He wouldn’t give us the money that we had won fairly and just ushered us out towards the door with all the women sitting at the machines staring at us. Some of them had cigarettes hanging from their lips and ash on their clothes. Some of them had little plastic buckets of pennies between their knees and some of them kept putting pennies into the slot and pulling the arm without looking, as if they couldn’t stop. At the door, Packer turned around and stared back at them all for a moment.

‘Vile and ordinary,’ he said slowly and triumphantly.

They didn’t care. I started laughing and the manager pushed me out. We both stumbled forward into the crowd passing by on the pavement.

‘Don’t fuckin’ show your faces around here again,’ the manager shouted, and the people on the pavement stepped away, wondering what kind of thugs we were. Packer said it was the biggest injustice ever. There was nothing we could do, nobody we could complain to, so we started getting our own revenge on the world, going around annoying people and coming home late, locking the train door when people were trying to get on, shouting at the station master and causing lots of trouble until the complaints started going into the school.

My mother was worried about me becoming a run-along. I would end up being a Mitläufer after Hitler, and the same thing would start all over again, everything the Germans went through with the Nazis. She wanted me to have a mind of my own, to stand out from the crowd and not to be like everyone else, running along after Packer. My father said I had been brainwashed. There was a lot of talk about indoctrination and bad influence. People were being brainwashed all over the Soviet Union, just as they were brainwashed under the Nazis as well. Now they were being brainwashed in snooker halls and coffee shops and amusement arcades all around Dublin. Places like Murrays basement record store and Club Caroline and Club Secret became famous for young people becoming powerless with alcohol and drugs. They were being hypnotized and had no minds of their own. They were dancing like puppets to the music, with no control over their own arms and legs. Onkel Ted had to come out to the house and we sat in silence together in the front room. After a long time, he told me he had been reading a book about crowds and power which described everybody being obsessed with privacy and making sure other people didn’t come too close. People saw each other as a threat, until they were in a crowd, that is, then they felt safe. People who wouldn’t say hello to each other in a million years were suddenly all friends going in the same direction.